The Truth behind the HBD cult prt 3

I’ll make this quick because you guys know how our guest writer T rolls on these posts.

Before you comment nobody is denying that genetic differences between races exist. If that’s going to be your comment you’re an idiot and your comment will probably be erased as waste of time/ argument

The way T set up people in Part 2 that claimed they were object and all about research is brilliant, I wont spoil it for you but I was impressed with how he got most people to walk right into that one.

T makes an excellent argument as to how the fixed mindset is effecting the black community and how fixed mind set connects the black community to HBDers. The man does work so I will turn it over to him now

In the last part I described Carol Dweck’s research into fixed mindsets/entity theory and growth mindsets/incremental theory. I described how the fixed mindset leads to a host of negative consequences in kids who are taught to believe that IQ is a natural gift that can’t be changed through hard work. I discussed this not just as a way to understand HBDers, but also to address core HBD beliefs head-on with actual research. The links and studies gave evidence that the fixed mindset HBDers advocate leads to stagnation, underachievement, and narcissistic, antisocial personality traits in kids, while a growth mindset of believing in the power of hard work has been shown to improve academic performance and IQ scores, including among minority students. I directly and indirectly linked to dozens (maybe even hundreds, I didn’t count) of studies showing how belief in hard work significantly increased minority academic performance, how belief in hard work raised IQ scores, how belief in fixed mindset had a negative effect on performance and motivation, and articles describing how even Alfred Binet, the inventor of the IQ test, was an incremental theorist who developed the test not to measure fixed intelligence but to identify students whose academic needs he felt the school wasn’t addressing so they could receive extra attention.

I didn’t go overboard in summarizing these studies and spelling out the ways they refuted HBD claims for a specific reason. I wanted to test whether HBDers would actually take the initiative to investigate them, or if they would just keep talking about what they were talking about the week before. If their claims about just being a bunch of neutral guys interested in research was true, they’d eagerly devour all of it. Yet despite over 100 comments of tenacious debating, they still didn’t open a single link or seriously address any of the research in good faith. Some people still claimed my post was pure ad hominem even though based on my links it clearly wasn’t, which is more proof they didn’t actually read them. Some people pretended to read it but mischaracterized what the research said, and others openly refused to even look at it. Check the last post’s comments for yourself.

The point of that was to prove this: the constant claim by HBDers that “all” of the research, science, and statistics overwhelmingly support HBD beliefs, and therefore only political correctness, hurt feelings, or an intellectual witch hunt of scientific evidence suppression can explain any HBD opposition is blatantly false. Despite what HBDers claim, when you read all of the research, the jury is shown to still be out, with plenty of evidence showing the importance of BOTH genetics and environment and other factors, and there’s plenty of evidence against their theories about the genetic immutability of minority achievement and IQ.

The key is, don’t just blindly accept premises people hand you without examining them for yourself. Even some neutral readers fell into this trap and commented that they saw my point about the personality of HBDers, but that I did nothing to address the science and findings of HBD. Because HBDers in the comments kept ignoring my evidence and claiming over and over that I only did ad hominems, the more neutral readers started taking that claim at face value despite tons of links to the evidence. Even some anti-HBD people fell into this trap of casually accepting premises presented by saying things like “sure, it’s pure ad hominem, but it’s justified” or “sure the data is overwhelmingly in favor of HBDers, but focusing on that is ridiculous and is just mean-spirited.” Don’t fall for the okey-doke. Don’t just blindly accept premises you don’t examine for yourself. The article was not just pure ad hominem. The data is not at all overwhelmingly one-sided in favor of HBD beliefs just because they keep insisting it. Reread it and follow all the links and studies provided. As you can see by the 115+ comments, HBDers don’t read opposing research that they don’t already have talking points for or know how to debunk already.If they were seriously interested in the research, no matter where it led, they’d take the time to not only explore all research but try to figure out what parts of it may be right and what parts of it are wrong. Instead, they immediately declared that every contrary study, 40 years worth and hundreds of them, were all 100% wrong from top to bottom. Once you can see for yourself how they refuse to read or even acknowledge the existence of any evidence or science they don’t agree with and can’t address, how can you trust their characterization of what all the available research says?

Too many people just accept their premises, then jump right into arguing according to those premises, without stopping to take a step back and examine whether those premises are even valid. Two of those premises are (1) that HBDers are well-meaning objective, unbiased truthseekers who are just following the evidence no matter where it leads them, rather than advocates are less interested in the objective truth than in a personal, self-serving ego-based agenda, and (2) the evidence is an overwhelming, indisputable, one-sided landslide in their favor, any research that goes against them has already been soundly debunked, and all alternative or additional explanatons have been exhausted. Parts 1 and 2, along with the behavior of HBDers in the corresponding comment sections to both, were designed to debunk those two faulty premises and to show that not only are HBDers often lazy about questioning these premises, oftentimes HBD-neutral and anti-HBD people can be lazy about questioning them as well, just casually accepting and debating under the constraints of these faulty premises.

This installment is dedicated to further addressing the HBD faulty premise about all the evidence being in their favor and all alternative or additional explanations being thoroughly debunked and exhausted.

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This week’s installment is still related to fixed mindset, but in a different way. Last installment discussed people with a positive fixed mindset, the belief intelligence is fixed and hard work doesn’t change things and that their own natural, genetically-determined intelligence is high. This installment is going to discuss peoplw with negative fixed mindset, which means people who believe intelligence is fixed and hard work does change things but that their own natural, genetically-determined intelligence is low. A major problem for many black people is that many of them, consciously or unconsciously, buy into a negative fixed mindset which causes them to have many of the same self-sabotaging, self-defeating tendencies that people like HBDers who subscribe to a positive fixed mindset have.

There is a field of psychological study related to Dweck’s work called Stereotype Threat, and just like Dweck’s Mindset research deals with how fixed mindsets affect people who buy into the legend of their own natural, innate superiority, Stereotype Threat deals with the ramifications of how fixed mindsets affect people who buy into or fear negative stereotypes that imply innate inferiority.

Allow me to provide an easy-to-read summary of some findings found in the body of fixed mindset/entity theory research:

Fixed mindset people prefer focusing on the role of nature and unchangeable traits to explain everything and downplay the role of nurture. More likely to fall prey to fundamental attribution error.

Fixed mindset people are much more focused on impression management (image maintenance) than on true growth.

Fixed mindset people are more likely to avoid a challenging task that might expose their imperfections and make them seem fallible and instead choose to repeat challenges they are comfortable with and already know how to respond to.

Fixed mindset people have less resilience and extremely aggressive, hostile reactions when faced with negative stereotypes about their own groups. They become fixated with thoughts of revenge or punishment. They are more emotionally and physically violent in either thoughts or deeds. They tend to be very high-conflict personalities, are more likely to read hostile intent into ambiguous actions that could plausibly be interpreted as friendly or hostile, and are more likely to view minor behaviors as being either excessively positive or negative.

Fixed mindset people will often use shortcuts, cheat, or even resort to outright criminality, to protect their image of superiority. However since these shortcuts keep them from ever fully proving themselves once and for all, they never get rid of the lingering doubts about their inferiority. Also, many times the cumulative effort involved in pursuing these shortcuts is more psychically draining and labor-intensive than just accepting the challenge without resorting to shortcuts.

Fixed mindset people think of failure or setbacks as evidence of being fundamentally, unchangeably defective, rather than just believing they’re someone who isn’t defective but maybe just had bad strategy or didn’t work hard enough. Not just that, but people with a fixed mindset have very different definitions of failure or setbacks. To a person with a fixed mindset, even just working hard, asking for help, or admitting fallibility is seen as a failure or setback, and as proof that maybe they aren’t naturally superior after all.

Fixed mindset people, when faced by stumbling blocks or failures, instead of working twice as hard, instead work even less hard, and instead switch focus to more ego-boosting, face-saving pursuits. The idea is they start believing either “obviously I’m not naturally talented enough to excel at this, so why bother?” Also, if they sincerely try harder and still fail again, they risk discovering more evidence of their natural inferiority and getting more of a bruised ego.

Fixed mindset people are more likely to engage in self-handicapping. They will go pursue a goal, but with an excuse in their pocket to protect their ego just in case. A popular example is the guy who prides himself on getting by on natural smarts and doesn’t study or go to class. If he doesn’t do good, he can say “Well, considering I crammed the night before, what do you expect? All things considered, I could have done far worse. If I did study, I would have totally rocked it.” If he does do good, he can say “Man, see how naturally smart I am? I did good without even studying or going to class. Imagine if I did study?” In addition to reducing effort, other examples include drug and alcohol abuse, refusal to practice, or reporting excessive symptoms. Another example is career self-sabotage, so that you can now blame your newfound controversial, pariah status for your lack of full success (you see this often in figures who actively court controversy, generate drama, and burn professional bridges, then use this controversy and blackballed status as excuses for why they’re not richer, more successful, or more celebrated).

Fixed mindset people, when criticized, can only attack and discredit the sources of the criticism, but can’t learn from constructive parts of the criticism and useful real-world feedback. Must throw out the baby with the bathwater, due to all-or-nothing, black-and-white, rigid thinking. Flaws must be concealed or ignored, and if that’s not possible, then rationalized away or minimized.

Fixed mindset people feel threatened by the success of others and become more interested in tearing other people down. They can only celebrate the success of others if those others can be proven to be similar to themselves, so that their success can be seen to reflect positively on them and can be piggybacked upon. Instead of judging their present selves against their old selves to see if they improved, they judge themselves by comparing themselves to other people. Fixed mindset people have increased tribalistic tendencies and are more hostile toward other groups. They have been found to constantly look for opportunities to reward themselves for being superior and mock other groups for being inferior.

Fixed mindset people are notorious chronic blamers. Research find they’re worse at taking responsibility for their lives and are extremely, unrealistically pessimistic about the future. They react helplessly to perceived setbacks and don’t believe in their ability to do anything about it. Instead their main coping strategies are threefold: to blame, to find excuses, and stifle all critics and rivals rather than address them thoughtfully. Fixed mindset people are also found to be less likely to focus on realistic, proactive real-world solutions to problems.

Fixed mindset people have a very adversarial, competitive, and confrontational concept of romantic relationships.

Citations and summaries for all of these findings can be found in the Dweck research materials linked to last installment. It can also be found echoed in the shame and narcissism research I linked to last installment as well, since they’re all interrelated concepts.

A key thing to realize: these studies find that fixed mindset only creates these things in the faces of perceived setbacks and failures. What this means is, so long as the fixed mindset person perceives he’s living up to his personal definition of success without experiencing frustration from a setback or failure, he will be mostly okay. The problem is twofold however: first, frustration from setbacks and failures are usually inevitable in life, and second, a fixed mindset approach to life makes your chances of encountering setbacks and failures far more likely because of the unrealistic expectations of others and yourself that the fixed mindset creates in you.

Blacks and whites both subscribe to the fixed mindset in America, but American society is constructed in such a way that blacks here often have a negative fixed mindset, where they are working with a negative label they believe may be unchangeable, and are afraid of deserving it and finding out that it’s true, while whites often have a positive fixed mindset, where they are working with a positive label they believe may be unchangeable, and finding out that they don’t deserve it and it isn’t true.

Stereotype Threat theory says that because blacks have a negative fixed mindset and often start off believing consciously or unconsciously that they have a setback or are a failure from the very beginning, just because they are black, the negative self-fulfilling prophecies and self-sabotaging effects of the fixed mindset start off immediately. White people who believe in the fixed mindset don’t suffer the negative effects of the mindset until they end up encountering significant frustration from setbacks or failures, and that’s when the negative self-fulfilling prophecies and self-sabotaging effects of the fixed mindset start to affect them. Now that our society is becoming increasingly narcissistic and short-sighted, it has embraced the fixed mindset more and has been instilling it it in both black and white children for generations, and more and more white people are beginning to fall prey to the same self-defeating behaviors as the black American community, except at later ages, and at higher income and education levels. Blogger Obsidian has long said that Black America is the “canary in the coal mine” for White America. Political thinkers like George Gilder have warned about this. Blogger Athlone McGuinness has made similar observations.

Even though American public policy often publicly embraces the opposite, in actuality it strongly endorses the fixed mindset. The negative fixed mindset of American public policy has already done a number on the black community, but now the positive fixed mindset is currently doing the same things to the white community. The negative fixed mindset was introduced into the black community by policies of the Great Society. The positive fixed mindset was introduced into the white community by the so-called “self esteem” movement that actually nurtured grandiosity rather than genuine stable self-esteem.

Whites with a fixed mindset like HBDers are more likely to avoid challenging tasks that can reveal imperfections in favor of areas they feel comfortable with. Debating the same studies over and over, mentioning the same black crime stats, searching out circle jerks to partake in, while ignoring or minimizing more challenging studies. Blacks with a fixed mindset are more likely to avoid challenging tasks that can reveal imperfections by sticking to blaming all problems on white racism, or putting their energies into entertainment and athletics and dismissing intellectual pursuits as “acting white.” Another way to avoid challenges in favor of shortcuts is by refusing to let go of affirmative action. Both groups can be seen as shying away from true growth in favor of impression management.

Dweck points out that companies like Enron had a corporate culture centered around fixed mindset. Look at the willingness to cheat, engage in criminality, search for shortcuts, bend the rules places like Enron had. This article argues that Bernie Madoff also had a fixed mindset, and was obsessed with being recognized as gifted. Can those be considered white collar versions of the criminal mindset of cheating and taking shortcuts to get respect that one sees in the black American community? Look at how HBDers read an anti-white, hostile intent into so many ambiguous behaviors, like movies and tv commercials. Is that much different than how black Americans see anti-black racism in everything? Look at how HBDers want to create a society where government gears public policy around giving their group special favorable treatment based on their race. Is asking that white people be given special favorable treatment based on being white, presumably for having high average IQ and being victimized by anti-white policies, that much different than black people asking for special favorable treatment based on being black, presumably for being victims of racism?

White people with a fixed mindset don’t like working too hard in an area where there’s a high risk of ego-bruising failure, asking for help, or admitting fallibility, because they view that as evidence of inferiority. Furthermore if they work hard and still fail, it can be viewed as proof of inferiority, so they’d rather self-handicap. Many black Americans stigmatize studying hard and practicing as “acting white”, and they will often engage in self-handicapping so as to provide excuses for underperformance and protect their egos. White fixed mindset people such as HBDers when criticized, can only attack and discredit the sources of criticism without being able to distinguish constructive criticism from useless hating. Black American people will often lump all critiques from white people under racism without trying to separate the constructive criticism from the mean-spirited hating. White HBDers are notorious blamers, blaming blacks, liberals, blank slaters, the government, feminists, schools, Democrats, Tradcons, and whoever else for their difficulties. Black Americans also are considered notorious blamers, blaming white racism and the “system” for many problems. Frustrated fixed mindset white people are increasingly viewing relationships as more adversarial, hostile, and opportunistic, and single motherhood and divorce is now rising in the white community. Black gender relationships have long been guilty of this same pattern.

Both white fixed mindset people and black fixed mindset people feel helpless to change the world, and are unable to form proactive solutions and realistic plans of actions. The white fixed mindset people act like nothing will go their way until they can get the whole world to recognize natural white genetic superiority, get blacks to voluntarily accept the idea that they are genetically destined for inferiority, and get public policy to be based on these principles. The black fixed mindset people act like nothing will go their way until they can totally eradicate all anti-black racism from the world, and until that happens, until every last bit of anti-black racism is gone from earth, they will always be screwed. Neither of these strategies are productive or realistic, and are really just self-handicapping and excuses for stagnation.

Take the challenge yourself. Look at the bullet points above describing fixed mindset traits, then figure out ways they manifest in among both white fixed mindset types and black fixed mindset people. The point is, if you look at the behavior of a frustrated fixed mindset white person, especially one as extreme as an HBDer, you will see very similar behaviors to the Black community in their actions.

I am going to make my case in the next installment for the assertion that it is actually the fixed mindset that explains black underperformance and modern white stagnation and decline rather than any supposed “blank slate” mentality in the next installment. The point is, though, that the fixed mindset is what led to many of the established problems in Black America and many of the currently developing problems in White America, and HBDers, by advocating further public commitment to the fixed mindset, will just end up exacerbating the very problems they complain about.

For more reading on the fixed mindset finding, click the links from the last installment. For a summary of stereotype threat studies, this provides a good summary.

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About The Author

Been in the game since 2005 and still learning everyday. But now I feel comfortable giving back and sharing wisdom with guys looking to improve one or two things in their lives that could increase their self confidence and the chance of having a favorable outcome in any romantic interaction with women. When you step to her you know you've already put in that work on your end. Nothing is left to chance.

54 Comments

I am one of the people who did read a bunch of Dweck’s studies over at her websites. This has not been a good couple weeks for priming studies, which is what Dweck’s are:http://chronicle.com/article/Power-of-Suggestion/136907/
There are no studies that I know of that specifically refute Dweck, but I’m still skeptical. IQ research on the other hand is very well established.

Furthermore, it is notorious in the IQ literature that you can get some fairly impressive temporary gains in test scores out of children, but they don’t seem to last. Permanent gains in IQ scores max out at about 5 points or so. That’ may be worth doing, but it’s not enough to close “the gap.”

Stereotype threat is also not doing well. Attempts at replication have outright failed. Here’s John List:

“So we designed the experiment to test that, and we found that we could not even induce stereotype threat. We did everything we could to try to get it. We announced to them, “Women do not perform as well as men on this test and we want you now to put your gender on the top of the test.” And other social scientists would say, that’s crazy — if you do that, you will get stereotype threat every time. But we still didn’t get it. What that led me to believe is that, while I think that priming works, I think that stereotype threat has a lot of important boundaries that severely limit its generalizability. I think what has happened is, a few people found this result early on and now there’s publication bias. But when you talk behind the scenes to people in the profession, they have a hard time finding it. So what do they do in that case? A lot of people just shelve that experiment; they say it must be wrong because there are 10 papers in the literature that find it. Well, if there have been 200 studies that try to find it, 10 should find it, right? ”

Dweck’s studies are not just about priming. Many of of her studies involve submitting students to extensive questionnaires to determine their existing predispositions to growth or fixed mindset, then tracking them accordingly. Youre looking for the fastest, easiest excuse to debunk 40 years of work and dozens to hundreds of studies. It’s very lazy.

I know I said I made my last comment, but I just had to remark about this one, because it just really blew my mind, and I thought it would provide a great teaching opportunity for neutral people reading along.

First you said:

Furthermore, it is notorious in the IQ literature that you can get some fairly impressive temporary gains in test scores out of children, but they don’t seem to last. Permanent gains in IQ scores max out at about 5 points or so.

So basically you can get fairly impressive
(1) temporary gains in test scores out of
(2) children, but they
(3) don’t seem to last and
(4) max out at 5 points or so.

Your claim is that this is “notoriously known” in IQ literature.

I point out a study that shows
(1) four years of gains (so not temporary gains like you said)
(2) in teens as old as 20 YEARS OLD (so not only in children like you said)
(3) with corresponding changes in brain structure and neural connections, implying that they are permanent (so not just temporary like you claimed),
(4) and IQ score gains as high as 20 points (so not maxed out at 5 like you said)

So it basically disputed every claim that you said was a done deal in IQ research and was “notoriously known.” Yet your response?

So, kids mature at different rates and sometimes at an uneven pace. That isn’t exactly news.

So first you said a set of facts was notoriously known in IQ literature. I point out a study that says something very different than what you claim all IQ research says. And you respond that it’s not exactly news and it’s common sense, even though your original claims were the opposite of what the study I responded to you with say.

If it’s not news, and it’s pure common sense, why did you say something significantly different before? The weird thing is, I don’t even think you’re intentionally being intellectually dishonest.

Nor is it evidence that there is an environmental cause.

Yes it is. A major point of IQ genetic determinists is that IQ remains relatively stable and fixed across one’s life, and childhood scores can predict adult outcomes. This study tracked significant changes in IQ among students across four years, and many students were up to age 20 by the end of the four years. Some students rose or fell by 21 points, in either direction. Some scores went up significantly, some scores went down significantly. So clearly the IQ levels aren’t fixed genetically at childhood if they could move significantly higher and significantly higher well into early adulthood, and if the brains actually change structure and neural connections, this is evidence of brain plasticity, which is an interaction between a brains genetic potential and its environment and nurturing.

The average of all scores stayed the same across the years, but individual IQ scores rose or fell by as many as 21 points, a substantial difference – enough to take a person of “average” intelligence to “gifted” status, or vice versa. “On average it all washes out, but there are fluctuations from individual to individual,” said Prof Cathy Price, who led the study.

Significant fluctuation in both directions, varying from individual to individual, is evidence against pure genetic determinism.

The brain scans found drifting IQ mirrored by changes in density of nerves and other cells in parts of brains, suggesting drifts are real changes in ability, not varying concentration, mood or motivation.

Shifts in verbal IQ – abilities such as memory, vocabulary, arithmetic and general knowledge – were reflected in the left motor cortex, the home of speech. Shifts in non-verbal IQ, problem-solving and the ability to spot patterns came with changes in the anterior cerebellum, for hand movements.

So your claim that the available IQ research shows that any IQ changes are minimal and likely temporary is not true.

The study contradicts a long-standing view of intelligence as fixed. Alfred Binet, father of modern intelligence tests, believed mental development ended at 16, while child psychologist Jean Piaget thought it ended even earlier.

The study blatantly contradicts your earlier kids’ claim, since it covered changes in people up to age 20.

Robert Sternberg from Oklahoma State University, who studies intelligence but was not in the research team, said: “A testing industry has developed around the notion that IQ is relatively fixed and pretty well set in the early years of life. This study shows in a compelling way that meaningful changes can occur throughout the teenage years.”

Our mental faculties are not fixed, he said: “People who are mentally active and alert will likely benefit, and the couch potatoes who do not exercise themselves intellectually will pay a price.”

The team now wants to know what causes IQ drift: the rate of brain change, or educational factors that stimulate some skills but not others; and also if changes are teenage only or whether IQ can vary as dramatically in adults. In the meantime, the message for children, parents and teachers is, as Ramsden writes in Nature, Ramsden says: “This [study is] encouraging to some whose intellect may improve, and a warning that early achievers may not maintain potential.”

This is what makes HBDer claims so amazing. Researchers who do these actual studies, and science experts who read them and analyze them, see these studies and all say that it opens up all types of possibilities, and that the jury is still out on just how much of a role nature and nurture play and how they interact. Meanwhile an HBDer on a comments thread obviously does not even look at what the study says based on how he mischaracterizes it, does not even realize that it is the total opposite of what he just claimed two comments ago, then acts arrogant about his misinterpretation, claiming that it supports his views when it blatantly doesn’t.

I’m not writing this out to convince HIM, because that’s pointless. But to any neutral people reading this, do you see what I mean about how HBDers can’t be trusted when they say the evidence is overwhelmingly in their favor? They will say anything to win an argument and avoid having to give any ground, even if it means blatantly contradicting something they said two statements earlier.

To Ricky Raw
“(1) four years of gains (so not temporary gains like you said)..”

The article you referenced indicated that there was a great deal of variation among individual students, not 4 years of gains.

“The average of all scores stayed the same across the years, but individual IQ scores rose or fell by as many as 21 points, a substantial difference – enough to take a person of “average” intelligence to “gifted” status, or vice versa.”

“Significant fluctuation in both directions, varying from individual to individual, is evidence against pure genetic determinism.”

“Pure genetic determinism”?
Even hardcore proponents of the genetic basis for IQ such as Rushton and Lynn admit that environment plays a role, albeit they think genetics has a greater influence.

I am not surprised that individual adolescents in the study had a fairly high variability in their IQ over the time of the study. The human brain is not fully developed until one reaches their early 20s.

Many of of her studies involve submitting students to extensive questionnaires to determine their existing predispositions to growth or fixed mindset, then tracking them accordingly.

I don’t have a quarrel with the idea that people who believe that they got to where they are through hard work will tend to do better than those believe it was all inborn. There are all sorts of delusional beliefs that help people live better lives.

It’s not a completely delusional belief though. I don’t quarrel either with the idea that there are many, many ways in which human beings can significantly improve themselves. I just don’t think that IQ is one of them.

I don’t have a quarrel with the idea that people who believe that they got to where they are through hard work will tend to do better than those believe it was all inborn. There are all sorts of delusional beliefs that help people live better lives.

*sigh* Dude, that’s not the point.

You mentioned that “priming” studies have been debunked, as if that somehow strikes a major blow against Dweck. Priming, for those who don’t know, is when researchers implicitly trigger or implant a thought suggestion into someone’s mind. My point is that Dweck’s studies don’t rely solely on priming. Many of her studies have no priming, but instead quiz the students on pre-existing beliefs via extensive questionnaires. What that means is, rather than using implicit suggestion via priming to get kids to believe in a growth mindset or a fixed mindset, they simply did extensive interviewing and personality profile questionnaires to figure out who already has a growth mindset and fixed mindset, and categorize them accordingly. So a debunking of “priming” has no effect on most of her research, since it mostly wasn’t based on priming in the first place.

I think that people ascasiote HBD with scientific racism because so much of the discourse around it bears a strong resemblance to what racists have and do say. Some people insist that HBD simply reflects a statistical reality based upon observation, which seems dishonest because many of the non-scientist followers of the theory insist on putting forward social/political policy changes that they believe should reflect their apparent genetic superiority. So even though there may be some who have a genuine objective scientific curiosity about it, there are others who have indeed taken to it like an acolyte to a cult. To me it seems like a moot point to say that social policy should be defined by a belief in fixed genetic possibility simply because evolution is always occurring, and people are always evolving. If we were to take Steve HSu’s idea to map genes of different populations on a matrix, then we may well see that genes for various traits do cluster along racial lines. But then we might notice that there are a few people, like Liu Xiang, or Dr Mark Dean that lie outside of the expected cluster. HBDers would dismiss this as perhaps a minor variation within a population, whereas a more objective view might suggest that these outliers actually reflect a drift towards a new trend wherein there are traits of higher intelligence or athleticism within populations that may not have exhibited those traits. The biggest problem for HBD activists is epigenetics. There is an increasing body of evidence and research that suggests that environment can affect an individual, who can then pass these traits onto his offspring without altering genes, even up to several generations later. If this is the case, then it is reasonable to assume that intelligence can be negatively impacted by generations of poverty.This is problematic for those who want to base social policies on genetic causation of intelligence. Even more interesting is a small but increasing amount of evidence that suggests that evolution of major traits can occur in an extremely short period of time. study on lizards who developed cecal valves after only 3 decades is strong evidence that organisms can evolve dramatically in a short period of time. Some scientists believe this is an example of epigenetic factors causing normally dormant genes in these lizards to be expressed. For those who cite HBD as a reason for things like eugenics, or whatever, this is a problem because it means that low IQ and whatever problems that come with it could possibly be addressed with more investment in improving environments, nutrition, family support systems and so on. And these changes could have a positive affect in a very short period of time. The couple or so HBD bloggers that I’ve read who have written about epigenetics, generally tend to try to unconvincingly hand-wave it away.

I’m wondering what results we get if we apply the same logic used in this argument towards the black community. (in fairness the author does make some concessions along these lines.)

I’ve often thought that if black people and particularly their leaders where to stop blaming external circumstances (read: fixed mindset) for their plights then a real change could begin to occur.

The “HBD cult” is simply white people who don’t buy the multi-cult BS. White people are the only people being told it is unacceptable to be tribal and that they must embrace all other peoples, and that the majority of those other races shortcomings are their fault. Obviously this is not the case, as I’m sure the author would agree based on the logic in this article.

All of this is simply backlash from forced integration, which is objectively bad for white people.

I don’t need complicated studies to reveal that I don’t want to live in a majority black community, and apparently neither do black people who can afford not to.

I don’t hate anyone based on a birth trait that they cannot change, and hate truly is wasted energy. But it pains me to see homogeneous white communities being forced to integrate at a great cost to themselves with no real benefit.

Generally when people of varying ethnicity do not mix unless they are forced to, or there is a strong external pressure that is common to different groups. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be around people that look like you.

I don’t follow… who’s “forcing” any mixing. You’re allowed to be around anyone you want. You can live in a rich all white community if you choose to and if you can afford it. You can live in a middle class white neighborhood as well. But if a black family can afford to live in the same place what are you going to do? You have the right to live anywhere you want, pick a spot with no black people and move there then. I here Salt Lake City Utah is happening right now

Forced integration is well documented, and written into many laws. Google restrictive covenants, disparate impact, affirmative action etc… This is a long list.

I live in Philadelphia, a decidedly not white city. I do however live in a nice neighborhood, with mostly white folks. People are divided by ethnicity in this city, and that is normal.

The point of this article is to try and discredit the HBD people, which you did not do a very good job of. I was only trying to provide some insight into some of their possible mindsets, and highlight why they might be expressing these ideas.

I can understand why people blogging those things would upset folks of the darker complexion.

I believe that these folks do seek the truth, if only to confirm the things that see as self evident in society, much like people who find the red pill.

In the 1960’s /70’s segregation was ended by laws mixing schools, work force etc etc etc. Many laws have come up to attempt from discriminating someone from living not being able to live somewhere based solely on race. Again the laws have forced this. So you’re either for it or against it, I’m not understanding what I’m missing here.

People do self segregate like I told you in my first comment if you want to be surrounded entirely by white people you can move to place where no other black people live. If you can afford to do so go for it. I’m not too sure what the issue is. You don’t want to be around black people move to where there are no black people.

“Got it, you believe in segregation… well that settles that … good luck with that happening in the US.” – That’s a liberal/feminine argument style. Look to any place where people argue with feminists and it should be easy to understand what I am saying here.

I am against laws that force the mixing of individuals, the same way I am against laws that forbid it. It’s not as simple as being for it or against it. I am against Jim Crow laws, the same way I am against laws that force mixing of schools. I never intended to debate this, I was simply trying to highlight the mindset of the people you are criticizing.

I’ve lived in places that really didn’t have any black people, and I didn’t enjoy those places. I like it here in Philly, even though a third of my city is black.

Here are the reasons I prefer to live places that are integrated:

* Every group is more tribal. Go to somewhere like Portland or SLC. The delusional and sheltered white people there have had no contact with any any large groups of other races. This typically means they are very liberal, which I don’t care for.

* Since I am white the police never bother me. They are too busy dealing with all the real crime that happens here, and it’s mostly black folks, so I don’t get fucked with compared to places like SLC where they have no real crime, and the police are over aggressive.

* Black Cops. I love black cops. They are usually about 10 times cooler than the white ones, and usually just don’t want to be bothered.

* Regular Weed. Yup, I’m talking about the kind you can buy for 5 dollars a bag in places that have higher murder rates than Iraq. I ca get an oz of it for 60 bucks. The strong stuff is too much for me, and you can’t really get regular weed if there is only white people around.

* There needs to be a hood. Before my financial success and cleaned up lifestyle I spent a good amount of time in the hood. While I no longer wish to live there, there is something about the lawlessness and insanity that I love, and I still need to go back and cut it up sometimes.

I’m wondering what results we get if we apply the same logic used in this argument towards the black community. (in fairness the author does make some concessions along these lines.)
I’ve often thought that if black people and particularly their leaders where to stop blaming external circumstances (read: fixed mindset) for their plights then a real change could begin to occur.

First, of course the same fixed mindset logic can be used to examine black people. That’s a major point of the post! I’m not an all-or-nothing thinker where everything has to be either one group’s fault or another group’s fault. That’s still that blaming mindset I discussed. Like for example, the second half of my post is all about how blacks and whites are perpetuating the fixed mindset and are involved in blaming, lack of accountability and self-handicapping. The first thing you do is say “well what about blacks, aren’t blacks guilty of that?” And then you claim how everything will be solved if only those blacks cleaned up their act, even though my point was that both blacks AND whites are guilty of the fixed mindset and have changes to make. You just reduced it all into what the other guy did wrong. Do you realize which fixed mindset behaviors from the bullet points in my article you just displayed?

Anyway this will be my last response for the thread, not counting any already in moderation that may be released later. I can already tell this is not going to go anywhere so far as meaningful dialogue is concerned.

I wanted to re-emphasize that point, I didn’t put anything in all or nothing terms.

I said you did make concessions but you still say that American society is set up in a way that instills this mindset on black folks. This sounds like blaming institutional racism, or white people etc.. This is pretty much the old argument that black people under perform because we set low expectations. While low expectations and lower performance have certainly been correlated, this is only a very small part of the picture.

I never claimed everything would be solved, strawman much? ( I had to). My thought was simply that if more individual blacks and black people collectively would take self responsibility we could MAYBE start to see a fundamental change.

Hey T, VK,
I want to thank you both for broaching and continuing this much needed and overdue discussion. T, I musy say that you’ve taken the discussion into a novel territory, and I appreciate it; but at the same time, I do feel that there is a danger of losing exactly what the center of the debate is all about. Since you’ve cited my several times over the course of these posts, and since I get the distinct impression that a number of White commenters here are getting a bit frustrated by what they see as an inaccurate characterization of their position(s) and why/how they adopted them, please allow me to present something I posted on my blog last year that itself, was born of a discussion I took part in at a blog called Hooking Up Smart. I call it The Obsidian Files HBD Reader:

HBD is an acronym for “Human Bio Diversity”-the idea that Humanity evolved different biological/psychological adaptations based on environmental concerns/challenges/problems in the ancestral environment. This became the basis for the differing human “races” if you will. It takes its key insights and theories from the Evolutionary Theory itself which as we all know came to us courtesy of Charles Darwin.

“HBD”, the term itself, was coined by one Steve Sailer, a former market research analyst and computer tech guy who made his bones in Chitown, attended Rice U. and was born and raised in Los Angeles. He’s married w/two sons and is better known these days as an “HBD” blogger, who specializes in “crimethink” topics like limiting primarily mexican immigration, limiting or getting rid of affirmative action primarily in terms of Black folks though Women are included in that too, and basically taking jabs at the White UMC/SWPLs for being the hypocritical pretentious snobs that they are.

Sailer is quite popular on the internet and has spawned what is known as the “HBDsphere”; the ideas that are discussed there have considerable overlap with other sectors of the Manosphere, like Roissy/Game blogs, because Game itself draws heavily on Evolutionary Psychology which itself draws heavily on Darwin’s theories of natural/sexual selection, etc.

The HBDsphere has a number of positions it holds chief among them is the idea that the SWPL class are waging a kind of Cognitive Class War on their White Lessers (read: solidly to nominally middle class and working class Whites) by foisting massive unchecked without limit illegal (Mexican i.e., not White) immigration, which forces down wages across the board for all but the most talented/connected in American society which just so happens to be those areas the UMC/SWPLs reside/work in; the efficacy and primacy of I.Q., per Murray & Herrnsteins work “The Bell Curve”; denouncing affirmative action as a way SWPLs/UMC uses it as a cudgel against White Males w/o SWPL/UMC status but nevertheless has high I.Q. talent; and to some extent railing against the predations of Feminism. The HBDsphere also tends to have an unfavorable view of Liberals and of course, Barack Obama.

HBDers, as they’re sometimes known, don’t necessarily consider themselves “racist” if by that it’s meant that they harbor ill will towards blacks/browns. Instead they refer to themselves as “race realists”-people who accept that the races in aggregate possess or don’t possess, certain attributes. Among these is I.Q.-for example many of this cohort will argue-not w/o evidence, I might add-that Black I.Q.’s tend to be lower than White and Asian ones. Therefore affirmative action policy in particular, and the meme that Black failure is attributable first and foremost to “racism” is unfounded. Moreover, the HBDers assert, their simple noting of these facts do not make them “racist”.

Having said that however, it is not difficult to tell that many of the commenters of blogs like Sailer’s-as well as a number of bloggers themselves-certainly seem to harbor at the least unflattering views of Blacks/Browns and even some Yellows(Asians). They also seem to have some hard feelings against the Jewish community in American life.

Personally I think the HBDsphere, regardless as to its more seedier elements, points to some powerful issues that American mainstream life has seemed to avoid-and has powerful implications for this very forum. How?

Dude are you kidding me with this 3 part blog post in the comment section? You could simply link to your original post and make comment’s or points off of that. Also you’re giving us the history of HBD and blah blah blah better suited for Part 1 we’re discussing fixed mindset at this point. I’d like to keep the conversation on the topic posted at hand.

Byron, can you define to us what makes a betetr or worse person? This gets thrown around so much that it’s basically meaningless, same with the accusatory “Racist!” remark. Dali, I’m glad you asked.I think it’s probably easier to begin with where HBD doesn’t hurt. If you begin to study HBD and convert, it probably won’t hurt your abilities in math or science. Your IQ won’t go down. You’ll still do well on those tests, and if you become a scientist, it probably won’t affect you.But it will make you a worse person in every other way. Want to become a manager? This will stop you cold in your tracks. You won’t be able to see the good in people and instead will reduce them to stereotypes. Want to be an innovator? You’ll only be able to see inspiration in European sources less than a quarter of humanity, only a small part of history. Want to study literature? Want to be a great parent, community leader, musician, thinker, etc? Good luck.Look at Steve Jobs, for example. Instead of college, he went to India to LEARN from them, people who HBDers disrespect because of stupid stereotypes and meaningless test data. He studied calligraphy because he loved it, something that has nothing to do with IQ. If he were an HBDer, his beliefs would’ve poisoned him. He would’ve learned nothing even if he went, because he’d only see things from the lens of racism.Check out the old HBD podcast. I remember reading something aloud from an HBDer who laments not being able to think about anything else but HBD when he met people. It’s a real human tragedy.

Hi VK,
Am I kidding? Nope, not one little bit. I think what I posted was a legitimate contribution to the current (and ongoing) conversation about HBD, precisely because of what’s being discussed. See VK, the dirty little secret is, there’s a good bit of blame to go around: sure, the HBDers have their stuff that stinks, but so does the rest of the society that created it – and since I’m on that point, let me take things a step further…
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As T has pointed out in this post and in the comments in the previous one, I’ve been writing about HBD and its champions for a good long minute now; but, more than that, I was confronting HBDers, as a Black Man, by myself, long before it became fashionable to do so. Roissy was and probably remains a good friend of yours; yet, for years, you were silent while he never wasted an opportunity to go in on Black folks. To this day, your blog appears on his blogroll, and he’s gone on record, in speaking on your behalf as his homey, that as you’re of continental African descent (Nigerian, am I correct?), that you didn’t see yourself as “one of them” – “them” meaning, native born, descended from Slavery, African American stock. In other words, what Roissy/Heartiste was saying about Black folks, what, barely five years ago, wasn’t something that didn’t apply to you – and since I cannot recall you ever coming on his blog to set things to rights one way or another, I had to assume that he was indeed speaking for you. Since you were homies and all (I’ve seen pics of you and him hanging out).
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And I can say the same thing as it relates to T as well, although to a slightly lesser extent. Like you, T too was at one point closely associated with Roissy/Heartiste, but when he began continually going in on Black folk, T just silently voted with his feet and left. But he didn’t openly confront Roissy, Virgil. Like you, T remained silent. To this day, I have proof that I was among, if not the lone Brotha going toe to toe against Roissy and his rabidly racist with a thin patina of HBD-fueled diatribes. One on instance in particular, one that I recall like it was yesterday, I was the lone Black Man defending Black Women – not because I was a White Knight in Blackface, but because I just didn’t see the point for him being downright meanspirited when it didn’t even call for it.
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So, while I am very glad that you and T are having this conversation, you’ll have to forgive me if I’m just a weebit cynical and suspicious. Timing, is important after all. Where were you, back in ’08? And why are you so hot and bothered about the issue now? And why haven’t you publicly called Roissy/Heartiste out on the carpet?
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Inquiring minds, truly do want to know.
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O.

First of all let’s get one thing very clear here, you don’t know me. By your own comment

“I had to assume that he was indeed speaking for you.”

All you do is assume. You say?

“that you didn’t see yourself as “one of them””

The fuck?!? Again you don’t know me, you don’t know what I’ve been through or how I see myself. As if me being Nigerian means I haven’t experienced any racism myself or I don’t know about that life. You need to pump your breaks real quick.
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As far as when and why I chose to do or not do things, when I chose to speak and not speak, who I chose to call out and not call out. That’s according to my own time and my own plans. Me addressing something at that time from one personal blog would only come off as some sort of personal war and not worth it. I also didn’t feel that my personal blog was on that level where a difference could be made. Finally I wouldn’t be dumb enough to jump into comment arguments with people who are so convinced that they are correct jump into the middle of the circle jerk. Where was I in 08? Fuck you. But if you must know I was an angry young man, all I cared about was getting pussy and figuring my own shit out. I would have argued from a personal position of anger and not making any sense. But I’ve grown (it takes time), I see big picture now, I don’t react based on anger or my hurt feelings. I put together NLU which in my opinion is a louder voice and covers more topics than my single blog could ever. And now I get to pull in minds that are brighter than myself that can make a better argument against HBD than I could.
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My timing and patience and willingness not to strike out of anger or fear is why you’re here right now commenting on this post on my blog…. and for you being the lone voice and doing so much work fighting HBD for so long, this is the first time I’ve even heard of you.

O, I didn’t just skulk off silently, I actually got into several exchanges over at Roissy’s about it before I left. It’s their corner of the woods, if they want to be be racist as hell over there so be it. It’s not like I’m going to change any minds over there, and I’ve got a life to live, I’m not going to waste time debating everybody who doesn’t like black people in their own backyard. I said my peace, no one listened, I moved on.

The reason I speak about it now is twofold. First, I think I have a better understand of things now and can back up my points far better now than I would have back then. Second, when it stayed in its own backyard I didn’t like it, but it’s their right to believe whatever they want to believe. It’s when I saw them spread out and constantly derailing threads at non-HBD sites with their nonsense, not only at my blog and on my twitter feed but at some of my favorite neutral blogs, and even on mainstream online news articles, that’s when I really got sick of it and fed up.

But what you’ve done here is exactly what I told you I didn’t want to happen in the last installment. Now it’s all going to turn into “inside baseball” about past blogosphere drama and not about the actual topic. Anyone who comes here from outside the manosphere curious about the topic is going to just see a bunch of what looks like gossip and drama about a few personal bloggers rather than about the bigger social topics.

“Please know that I harbor no ill will towards you, VK – as you rightly observed, I don’t know you, no you me. So it seems that we have an opportunity to get to know one another. I extend the hand of friendship towards you.”
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This is the first thing you should know about me, I don’t and have never answered questions on why I do or don’t do something in comment section, that’s all you need to know. Now if you want to discuss this post and what’s about then comment on the post. If you want to know my personal history, take a number and get in the end of the line. The choice is yours

Good Morning, VK,
Replies below:
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“This is the first thing you should know about me, I don’t and have never answered questions on why I do or don’t do something in comment section, that’s all you need to know. Now if you want to discuss this post and what’s about then comment on the post. If you want to know my personal history, take a number and get in the end of the line. The choice is yours”
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O: Well, I suppose you weren’t lying when you said that you had quite a temper, LOL. As well as quite an itchy delete button trigger finger, to boot! It’s really no big deal, bro. Really, it ain’t that deep. Just asking for clarification on some things, is all. No harm, no foul.
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As for the post topic itself, as you now know, and as T himself has made clear in his references to me, I do indeed have quite a bit to say. That, will appear in my next comment.
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Whooosaaaaaah, VK; whooooosaaaaaah…
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O.

O,
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Let’s try this one more time. I’m not sure if you don’t understand how to make a comment about the current post that’s on point with the current subject.
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The topic is about how fixed mindset effects HBDers negatively and how it also effects the current black population in a negative manner as well. You can go agree or disagree, bring up research that supports your argument on fixed mindset, if environment has anything to do with improving IQ or not, or if IQ can be improved through hard work.
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Do not give us a history lesson on HBD, who made it cool and brought into the mainstream blah blah blah. If you have an issue with Roissy then put it on your own blog. If you want to give a history of HBD and Steve Sailer maybe comment on Prt1. But as of now we have moved on down the road to a different part of the discussion.

I agree that the mindset of the HBDer is much more like that of the religious fanatic than that of the inquisitive scientist. The big tipoff is their absolute confidence in the truth of their beliefs. Without getting too deep into epistemology, I’ll say that when it comes to inference, it is impossible to “know” anything. Any scientist with his salt will tell you that science can’t prove the truth of a model, it can only disprove models that aren’t true.

HBDers are not geneticists, they’re armchair sociologists (social psych if I want to be generous). I don’t think I’ve seen any of these guys drop a single study that would be published in a computational biology journal. I don’t mean to bag on social psych, they do a lot of fascinating research, but no one is holding the field up a a paragon of scientific rigor. Sheet, even genetics is under attack for sloppy statistics.

As someone very aware of the state of the art of genetics, I can tell you that no one I’m aware of is studying the genetic basis of intelligence. Pretty much all of the heavy hitters are into medicine (real life and death matters). While there is some debate, it is pretty much widely accepted that genetic determinism is generally not the rule (excepting rare cases like Huntington’s). You come up with a risk allele for obesity or diabetes, then they tell you to pay extra attention to your diet and exercise.

I posit that not only are the attitudes of HBDers uninformed, they are also unethical and immoral. Suppose that sometime in the future, we are able to uncover a bunch of alleles that are predictive of IQ. A genetic test of an individual predicts a lower IQ. Does this not call for intervention? The general HBD attitude that this person should be written off. It is analogous to a case where someone has a risk allele for heart disease. The correct thing to do would be to have the patient take an aspirin a day (possibly satins), and place them under increased surveillance so that any heart disease or additional risk factors can be caught and taken care of early. The HBD attitude is that we should not use our resources on this group, and should instead spend additional cardiology resources on people with a lower risk of heart disease?!

Anyways, I haven’t even gotten into missing heritability, how there are no good methods for detecting eptistatic or gene-environment interactions, etc. But, this shit is turning into ‘War and Peace’. I’m out.

something else its our responsibility to sit anorud debunking every single one. It isn’t. Our responsiblity is look to the vast majority of overwhelming evidence. And that evidence is pretty convincing.Morever, the burden of proof is on the blank slatist. Remember that common sense is on our side. HBD is proven to us every single day with our eyes. We see its effects every single day. The burden of proof is on the person who says our eyes are lying to us.When I watched the NFL last year I might have noticed that such and such a team had a hard time running off tackle to the right side. That’s what I saw with my eyes. Then when pro football focus puts out its prospectice I can see from their detailed statistical analysis that they indeed had a hard time running off tackle to the right side. The numbers confirm what I saw with my own eyes.Now, there are any number of sports morons that will disagree with that assessment. And they may even offer all sorts of out of context or incorrect statistics. Is it my responsiblity to correct the bad stastics usage of every single sports moron? No. I saw something with my eyes and a very in depth statistical analysis I understand and trust supported it. That’s good enough evidence for me.That’s why so many people who go to your site are HBD believers. For the longest time they were told by the authorities that X was true. However, they kept seeing Y with their eyes. Then they found out that the statistics actually backed up the Y they were seeing, not the X. For many it starts with things like the difference between men and women, but the exact same logic applies to race. You don’t make the connection because you don’t want to make the connection, not because it isn’t there. It’s hard to notice the evolutionary differences between men and women and not also notice the evolutionary differences between races.And truth be told its not controversial. Only in the west is there a strong anti-racist religion amongst the elites complete with inquisition. Again if you go to Asia everyone believes in HBD. Are you telling me two billion people and whole countries are just shame based losers? What about all the successful HBDers? Steve Hsu is risking his career publishing this stuff under his own name. He’s a renowned physics professor, martial arts expert, and heavily involved in the tech start up community. Are you telling me this guy is doing this because he’s got shame issues? He’s 10,000 times more successful then you. They guy just wants his co-ethnics to stop getting the shaft in college admissions, and he is willing to risk his career promoting HBD to make it happen.Black people deny HBD because it sucks for them. White people deny HBD because its a status signal to do so in our society. However, take away those incentives (as is the case in Asia) and everyone simply takes what they see as what it is and trust the mountains of data showing their eyes aren’t deciecing them.

How to refute Ricky Raw
1. Ignore all research parts and keep pretending he did nothing but identify psychological disorder, because that’s easier to deal with
2. Dismiss him based on that strawman
lol. And we’re supposed to take anon seriously?

[And HBDers are no John Nash in intellectual rigor, by the way. Try a more realistic, less self-aggrandizing analogy next time.]

Tazzy Bee, I totally agree with you and what you quoted was sloppy wording on my part. But my next installment actually makes my feelings on this matter clearer, and you’ll see I’m onboard with what your saying.

Right — where in your 5000 word plus diagnosis did you refute substantive claims of HBD?

LIke, if you said something about race not being a biological concept; or if you had shown that IQ tests are not highly predictive of success in the west; of if you had shown that the black white IQ gap in the US is empirically false; of if you had shown that intelligence is not additive; or if you had shown that gene-environment correlation explains most of the IQ gap between black and whites, then you might have gotten the debate you were looking for. But you didn’t.

Of course there is a biological basis for race. People of different races have different physiological traits. However, when you start talking about genetics, things like race take on a different meaning than what you think. You should check out the International HapMap Project and read some population genetics papes if you want to getter a better sense of what I mean. The research you’re talking about is sociology/social psych, not genetics or biology.

I believe since you are the one claiming a deterministic genetic basis for intelligence it should be on you to provide evidence of this, as it runs contrary to pretty much everything we know about how the human brain works (long term potentiation, neural plasticity, etc). But you won’t be able to, because no genome wide significant SNPs have been found that can explain anything more than a negligible amount of the variation in human intelligence.

Now what “intelligence” is, and whether it is even quantifiable is still an open question, much less whether IQ is an accurate measure of it. That being said, I haven’t seen any study showing the heritability of IQ (I believe that it probably is heritable, btw). Furthermore, heritability does not necessarily imply genetic inheritance. Wealth, religion, social values, and social status are all very heritable traits, but nobody would argue that any of those things are genetic.

Your problem is that you have a very basic understanding of genetics and physiology. You took a biology class and learned about inheritance of mendelian traits, and you think that’s how things mostly work. It’s not. Very few traits fit that model. The overwhelming amount of phenotypes are the result of much more complex interactions between many different genes and the environment. If you think you have some kind of valid basis in the biological sciences for your beliefs, you are kidding yourself.

LIke, if you said something about race not being a biological concept; or if you had shown that IQ tests are not highly predictive of success in the west; of if you had shown that the black white IQ gap in the US is empirically false; of if you had shown that intelligence is not additive; or if you had shown that gene-environment correlation explains most of the IQ gap between black and whites, then you might have gotten the debate you were looking for. But you didn’t.

OOOOOOOHHH, I missed this part. NOW I get your actual complaint.

You’re complaining that I didn’t follow a script that allowed you to use a prepared talking point from your HBD idols and that would force you to prove your own intelligence by doing your own thinking against a novel counterargument.

THAT’S what you mean by I didn’t refute any HBD points. You mean I didn’t refute them in the way you would prefer, the way that would make you look smart.

For people reading along, look at this specific bullet point about fixed mindset that I listed in the article:

Fixed mindset people are more likely to avoid a challenging task that might expose their imperfections and make them seem fallible and instead choose to repeat challenges they are comfortable with and already know how to respond to.

This is exactly the type of behavior anon is falling into here.

There are certain arguments anon was looking to see that he’s probably responded to over and over in HBD debates using prepared talking points. I didn’t use those challenges he likes to respond to over and over again, so he’s trying to lead me on-script so that he can do so. Again, part 2 has links to dozens, possibly hundreds, of studies by Dweck and her peers that show academic performance and IQ scores can be significantly improved by hard work as late as the teenage years, including many minority students. This comments thread also has a link to a study showing brain plasticity and the possible role of environment

You, on the other hand, say you need me to make different assertions:

– That there is no genetic difference between races. (Despite the fact VK just said in the second sentence to this piece that no one’s denying this. Reading comprehension anon!)
– That the IQ gap is empirically false. (I’m not denying that it’s real. Of course it exists.)
– Intelligence is additive (this is irrelevant to my point, but since it’s probably an argument you have talking points prepared for, I guess, you feel I should argue this for the benefit of you appearing smart)
– IQ predictive of success (actually, I DID address this point. Dweck’s studies and research show that IQ alone is not predictive of success. It’s only half the equation. IQ plays a role, but without motivation, even high IQ people end up underperforming or becoming outright failures. Meanwhile even people of average IQ with high motivation can do quite well. And one of the biggest sappers of motivation among high IQ people? The fixed mindset. Reading comprehension anon!)

So, because I didn’t assert things I didn’t believe but would have been easier to answer for you, or because you couldn’t recognize when I actually did address one of the topics you wanted me to address (presumably because you didn’t really delve into the research I provided), you claim all I did was psychoanalyze. Whatever.

you might have gotten the debate you were looking for.

You mean if I followed any of your suggestions YOU would have gotten the debate you were looking for. One that rewards your rote memorization of talking points. That wasn’t the debate I was looking for. The one I was looking for was exactly the one I got: the one that proves HBDers only care about arguments they already feel they have the answers for, not the ones that challenge them and force them to rethink anything, and that the won’t seriously engage or honestly interpret any contrary evidence they come across.

In response to the John Nash comment…No, not all HBDers are as smart as John Nash. Duh. And in fact, my point was not to draw similarities between Nash and HBDers, but to draw similarities between dismissing him because of his psychological disorder and dismissing HBDers because of their psychological disorder.

Reading comprehensions, rick!

Furthermore, there have been HBDers as smart as Nash. Try Dr. Schockley,Sir Francis Gatlon, John Keynes,Francis Crick and many many more!

blockquote>In response to the John Nash comment…No, not all HBDers are as smart as John Nash. Duh. And in fact, my point was not to draw similarities between Nash and HBDers, but to draw similarities between dismissing him because of his psychological disorder and dismissing HBDers because of their psychological disorder.

Yes, someone using nothing but personality disorder diagnosis to discredit someone’s evidence and nothing else would bad, I agree. Since I didn’t do that and I directly addressed several HBD research claims, I have no idea why you are using this Nash hypothetical. It’s not applicable.

Reading comprehensions, rick!

If you can read part 2 and still miss the evidence that addresses HBD claims, you are the one in need of reading comprehension, anon. Not me. Either that or you need to learn how to use the click button on your mouse. Sorry to burst your bubble.

@The Specimen
“Of course there is a biological basis for race. People of different races have different physiological traits.”

I agree with you about this.

“However, when you start talking about genetics, things like race take on a different meaning than what you think.”

What do you mean ‘start to talk about genetics?’ Was not your first point ‘talking about genetics?’

A very bad start so far, but let’s continue:

“I believe since you are the one claiming a deterministic genetic basis for intelligence”

No, i am claiming that both environment and genetics affect intelligence.

” it should be on you to provide evidence of this, as it runs contrary to pretty much everything we know about how the human brain works (long term potentiation, neural plasticity, etc).”

It should be on me to provide evidence, but you can throw around words like ‘neruplasticity’ and long term potentiation’ without citing any evidence or discussing the implications of these two phenomenon on intelligence.

For example: I know that intelligence is not static. I know that it deteriorates with old age. I know that verbal intelligence is fairy stable throughout life, whereas spatial reasoning deteriorates with old age (Deary, Ian J., Intelligence, a Short Introduction).

If you respond to to me, please clarify the implications of neruplasticity and long term potentiation on the HBD understanding of intelligence.

“. But you won’t be able to, because no genome wide significant SNPs have been found that can explain anything more than a negligible amount of the variation in human intelligence.”

Right, no one has been able to account for most of the variation in intelligence as a function of genetics, but that does not preclude the possibility that genetics can explain most or a significant part of the variation. The same discordance exists within research of height, but one would not dismiss the heritabiltiy and genetics basis for height so quickly. There is also no know genetics cause for homosexuality , but that does not preclude the possibility of a genetic basis.

“Now what “intelligence” is, and whether it is even quantifiable is still an open question, much less whether IQ is an accurate measure of it.”

IQ is apparently what it takes to succeed in the west. We know that IQ is highly correlated with income((Deary, Ian J., Intelligence, a Short Introduction), job performance (Schmidt, F. L. & Hunter, J. E . (1998), and school performance(Neisser et al. (August 7, 1995)

So it turns out that people who you would expect to be smart and expect to do well in school do well on IQ tests. Clearly IQ is not meaningless ‘noise.’

“That being said, I haven’t seen any study showing the heritability of IQ (I believe that it probably is heritable, btw).”

” Furthermore, heritability does not necessarily imply genetic inheritance. Wealth, religion, social values, and social status are all very heritable traits, but nobody would argue that any of those things are genetic.”

Obviously not, but one cannot preclude the possibility that intelligence is genetic.

“The overwhelming amount of phenotypes are the result of much more complex interactions between many different genes and the environment. ”

I like how you said ‘overwhelming amount.’ Tell me, does this exclude intelligence? Furthermore, the presence of interaction does not preclude one’s ability to separate the environmental and hereditry components of variation in a trait (Sesardic, Making sense of heritability, p. 54).

Hahahaha! How long did it take you to find that reference? From 2005, with Excel charts in it? LOL!

Here are Pubmed IDs for some real, current scholarship on the subject of gene environment interactions (PMID: 20070199, PMID: 22199026). As you can see, it is very much an unsolved problem.

In terms of long term potentiation and neural plasticity, you are a grown man with a working internet connection, look that shit up on wikipedia if you don’t understand what I’m talking about. I’m not here to spoon feed you a course on neuro biology. What I am saying is that your argument about a deterministic mechanism for intelligence runs counter to the current very well studied and established mechanistic model we have for how the brain works. I’m not making this shit up. It’s in just about any college level neuro bio textbook you can find.

You say “IQ is apparently what it takes to succeed in the west. We know that IQ is highly correlated with income.” The socioeconomic status of your childhood peers, your parents net worth the neighborhood you were born in, and the quality of your elementary school are all correlated wit future income as well. Are you arguing that those are also genetically inherited traits?

BTW, non genetic factors also have a big influence on height. See the height gap between North and South Koreans (~2-5 inches). Oops. It was a total red herring of an argument, but I figured I’d address it anyway just cuz.

You arguments are garbage. You’ve pretty much just cited social psych papers. The one decent paper you’ve mentioned is the Davies paper, though had you actually read and understood it, though the Yang paper he references in the statistical analysis section supports your argument a lot better. The Davies has has lot of problems (they talk about them in the discussion).

That being said, while it’s great reading, I’m skeptical of some of Yang’s results. Regression on data with dimension p > N (30,000 SNPs at 10% subset vs 4000 subjects) will almost always overfit (i.e look like a better model than it is,) unless you’re using some kind of regularization method like an L1 penatly or subsets selection (similar to a method like MDR). I’m doubly suspicious because the model they use to estimate the variance explained by SNPs has such low predictive power, which is suggestive overfitting. Not that you understand that argument anyway.

Can you summarize what Dweck’s studies show. Very very specifically. Not just, “it shows IQ can be raised.” It can be raised in what control group, under what conditions, in what amounts, over what time periods.

For instance lower down in the comments someone said they read Dweck’s work and it showed that some people in the group raised their IQ in the teenage years and some lowered. If the mean averaged out then it doesn’t actually show what your asserting. We expect varied results within a group.

Did the results last well into adulthood?

Are the tests normalized to their ages or the same throughout?

And many others.

I ask because as I’ve mentioned before, its not the HBD communities job to review every single debunking study in detail. HBD has the weight of evidence and it matches up with what we observe in our everyday life.

I’ve read so many studies at this point. Including many studies that are supposed to debunk HBD. All of them have failed to do so. Even in your previous comments I debunked most of your claims easily. The burden of proof wrests on your if you want to convince others.

I view this debate like I view a debate about Mark Sanchez. When I watch Mark Sanchez play, he’s terrible. When I look at his basic statistics, he’s terrible. When I look at really advanced stats produced by football outsiders, he’s terrible. The wieght of evidence is against Mark Sanchez.

However, if I go on a Jet’s fan forum there will be some guy writing posts about how Mark Sanchez is great. He will post inane statistic and logic one after another. “He played great on Oct 11th 2012.” Sample size is too small. Etc. Because they want Mark Sanchez to be a good quarterback they will always find an incorrect or non-contextual arguement for it.

Is it my job to debunk every rambling of this fan? No. I’ve got the weight of evidenece on my side. Do I really need to keep refuting every dumb point? If he wants to convince me he’s got to put in the work.

Look, your black. You don’t like what HBD says about you. I get it. Like the Jet’s fan that doesn’t like people ragging on his QB you don’t want to accept it. But its true.

I think its very painful and cruel to blame the low IQ for their low IQ. That’s basically the case your making here. That they could raise their IQ if only they acted different. They could raise it 20 points! It’s all so absurd.

I’ve seen that attitude up close. I used to work for an Asian cram school when I was much younger. I had one student who was clinically retarded. His parents insisted he was going to Harvard. In addition to school he spent 30 hours a week doing drills at the cram school. Of course the scores never improved much. He was who he was. There was no changing that. I watched that kid break down crying one day because his parents kept telling him it was all his fault that he wasn’t smarter. Everything can be solved with hard work. He just wasn’t working hard enough.

The same is true for smart kids. I had another Asian friend who got a 1550/1600 on the SATs. His parents beat him. Said if he worked harder he would do better. Anyone can be anything they want! Of course he couldn’t. I watched him throw his teenage years away on SAT prep. That’s just as far as it could take him. Everything we know about SAT prep affectiveness says the same thing, it doesn’t do much.

Your attitude that anyone can raise their IQ 20 points if they just have a positive attitude better be true, because if it isn’t its the cruelest hoax I’ve ever seen.

For instance lower down in the comments someone said they read Dweck’s work and it showed that some people in the group raised their IQ in the teenage years and some lowered. If the mean averaged out then it doesn’t actually show what your asserting. We expect varied results within a group.
Did the results last well into adulthood?
Are the tests normalized to their ages or the same throughout?

Science, it was not a Dweck study, the links are up above in my response to commenter A, and the explanation is there as well. Scroll up, read the links, get your answers. I’m not going to waste time debating with you at length because you’ve proven you’re not very good at it. Stop being lazy and read the study yourself and you’ll find the answers to what the study says. Instead you ask me very basic questions about the study you can get just by reading even the abstract. Oh wait, we already determined you don’t read studies that go against your belief system. I forgot.

By the way, regarding the rest of your comment? I already utterly destroyed you last time you attempted it in the comments to part 2. So now instead of responding to me over there, you try to rephrase it, clean it up, and launch it at me again here. For people who want to know what I’m talking about, read what happened when science tried this same stupid QB and hurt feelings comment last time:http://nexxtlevelup.com/everything-else/the-truth-behind-the-hbd-cult-prt-2#comment-1745

I get it, science. What I say pokes holes in your belief system and hurts your feelings. It reaffirms that maybe you aren’t a special snowflake after all, or that you didn’t really earn any right to feel superior. I get it hurts, but the truth is the truth. [Ugh, I hate resorting to arguing like you with the lame “hurt feelings” accusation, even when I do it just to mock you.]

Science, we’ve already established that you like to read “the overwhelming evidence behind HBD.” The problem is, like in the last comments section, we also established that you melt down and cry like a baby and stamp your feet when confronted with the overwhelming evidence AGAINST HBD, and refuse to read it, like a toddler who sticks his fingers in his ears and screams “LLALALALALALAL I CAN’T HEAR YOU.”

Contrary to the oft-heard-but-incorrect HBD proponents’ claim that “Intellectuals have not attpmeted to embrace the idea of HBD,” intellectuals started “HBD.”When people say that intellectuals are against the idea of HBD, they are of course talking about contemporary intellectuals. Everybody knows that HBD used to be mainstream.If I compared population heights, vertical jumps, IQ, bowling scores, head sizes, or whatever, it’s highly unlikely that I’d get the exact same results. It’s a strawman.The strawman is all yours. The HBD view is that there are socially significant heritable differences between races and sexes. The real question is whether these tiny differences mean anything. If my IQ is 125 and yours is 123, does that mean I’m gunning for success and you’re doomed to failure?Another strawman. It’s not about a difference of a couple of points between high-IQ individuals, but about mean differences between groups which can be as large as a standard deviation or more. Differences of that magnitude have huge societal effects, something which even anti-hereditarian researchers admit. For example, sociologists Christopher Jencks and Melanie Phillips have written that reducing the black-white test score gap would do more to move America toward racial equality than any politically plausible alternative . As any political strategist will tell you, you can change the world with 30 second commercials and sound bites. With the influence of Hollywood, even intellectuals fall under the sway of the mass media. It’s easy for the media to get persuade people that dumb black men and weak Asian men are the norm, that it’s somehow genetic.Are you seriously arguing that Hollywood tries to persuade people that black men are dumb? Do you live in some alternate universe where Hollywood movies are NOT populated by brilliant black scientists and professionals and where 95%+ of murderers and other criminals in movies are not white? As to Asian men, there are too few of them in Hollywood movies for them to have any kind of effect on public perceptions.For example, we know that IQ is malleable–people can study for such tests.IQ is just a measure of intelligence. It’s not intelligence itself. Studying for an IQ test may improve your score, but it does not make you smarter because the superior performance is not transferred to other tasks. The heritability of IQ in adults is currently as high as 80 percent in the West. This suggests that eliminating all trait-relevant environmental differences between people would reduce the variation of intelligence only by 20 percent, i.e. the vast majority of IQ differences would remain even if everyone grew up in an identical environment.It’s easier to believe in limits because it’s a lazier way of thinking.Actually, it’s much easier to believe in limitless malleability because that’s what you’re supposed to believe in these days. Public discourse is premised on the unproven and highly improbable idea that groups do not differ in their genetic potential, and anyone who publicly challenges this will face sanctions. Anti-HBD is the safe, unimaginative approach, which however is constantly being threatened by the failure of the reality to conform to it, necessitating the postulation of conspiracy theories like institutional racism .Think about it–have any of you ever met an Asian guy with a high emotional EQ, who expresses himself freely, who has an entrepreneurial mind, and who also believes that groups of people face limits because of their race?Why do you refer to EQ, a highly dubious if not downright pseudoscientific construct? Anyway, Steve Hsu might fit your bill.Believing in racial limitations is a lazy man’s way of thinking. Believing in HBD makes you a worse person. We’ve seen the Asian American HBD believers on this site. They have little faith in humans, little in the way of dreams, and little in the way of proactive creative thinking.So, you think HBDers such as Hume, Darwin, Galton, Crick, Stockley, and Watson were terrible underachievers?HBD is simply the recognition that genetic variation influences human outcomes. It’s the complement to human cultural variation. Without HBD, you cannot fully comprehend human behavior.Of course, no hereditarian believes that practise does not improve one’s performance or that cultural and environmental differences are not relevant, so your argument is another strawman.There is no evidence that people have genetic limitations.Okay, show me someone capable of self-propelled flight, or telekinesis. Or, more mundanely, show me a dwarf performing a slam dunk (. It’s patently obvious that people have genetic limitations.

, I think I’ll put my two cents that comes to my mind reading this.I’m going to make this snetamett. I have thoughts that HBD may exist in some form. Seeing that you quoted me, I guess you already view me as a full-on proponent. But I take those arguments in previous comments because I find your arguments against it so fallacious. Arguing that HBD bloggers remain hidden behind pseudonyms in the web as evidence that HBD is not evidence they are right or wrong Saying how expressive, entrepreneurial, high EQ person doesn’t agree is fallacious in that there’s no evidence if such a group does or not and how does one that one particular group would have any more authority than any other group of people. Being more expressive or more entrepreneurial doesn’t denote greater authority or more likelihood they are right. I also cannot agree that HBD is created to keep us down like they are conspiring against us. I believe it is a genuine thought posed by such bloggers. Not a plan to co-opt us like a appointing a house slave to his own brethren. Half Sigma genuinely believe his ideas, not trying to break the force of will of Asians or other races to keep trying to succeed at whatever their endeavor they wish.Arguments like that makes me write comments questioning your snetametts and increasingly side more with their ideas. -Now that said, I also think you have a some points, though not worded in a way I would like or would word it myself. HBD may exist, but it doesn’t mean the gaps that exist right now can’t be closed. It also being misapplied. Many individuals would look at themselves and say Those HBDers are right my genes makes me too Beta to attract girls. Major misapplication, to take a quote from Roissy/Rollo Tomassi (two game bloggers, former is more of a paraphrase), Alpha is a state of mind, not a demographic. Or perhaps in BigWowo’s examples, we apply stereotypes and assume the person rather than figure out the person. Nobody fits exactly to a stereotype and it becomes especially unfair to those who really buck the stereotype too. It can also be misapplied to general ideas too. Bigwowo’s is right with his point behind his examples of Mike Tyson or the 4 minute mile. Don’t assume all potential is already met, losing our thought there more possibility exist. In applying to Asian Issues, the IR situation sucks, but it doesn’t mean we can’t remedy it on some level. If enough consciously or unconsciously increase our success rate, it does affect the trends (ideally through game or some other means, not by making $24k more on average). I would like this dedicate this paragraph to note that I would use better examples than Mike Tyson or the 4 minute mile for arguments about the general sense. As they are examples of the extremes instead of the average. A better example is the history of African American in general and quite individual in nature. My understanding of their history that despite institutional segregation, less educational resources, and openly hostile people (my understanding of HBD is open thought about potential between races, not outright desire to see a person or group fail), they were more functional as a community. Homes were better maintained, kids stayed in school more with a greater desire to learn, and the men were willing to work. While the educational gap remains and the workers can’t get promoted much, the community was functional. This is in contrast to today where so many drop out of schools, remain unemployed, and dysfunctional homes. Basically, full potential is not being met and we can see that with their history. They are also an example of a paradigm shift in patterns of a race (to the negative unfortunately).I think HBD does exist on some level. It seems to apply to other things like diseases susceptibility and height following races, so what physical or biological law prevents IQ or personality following races on some level. However, it doesn’t mean we don’t have more potential, nor can lazily apply stereotypes to individuals (or ourselves), nor are our is already destiny is already set before us.